I agree with dave3. I started out slow in July 2011, learned from my mistakes and with a lot of help from people on this board. When I stopped mining my relatively small 10 GPU farm this past April I had earned ~550 bitcoin, which I havn't sold. Now my expectations for the one SC Single I have on order are much more tempered. Probably won't do any better than my GPU results over a similar timeframe and most of that will be front loaded.

I agree with dave3. I started out slow in July 2011, learned from my mistakes and with a lot of help from people on this board. When I stopped mining my relatively small 10 GPU farm this past April I had earned ~550 bitcoin, which I havn't sold. Now my expectations for the one SC Single I have on order are much more tempered. Probably won't do any better than my GPU results over a similar timeframe and most of that will be front loaded.

I totally agree that one's expectations about the age of ASIC mining should be tempered. But from the way that people are piling in with orders, it seems that many are pretty much frothing at the mouth about it. I'm not sure about this, but it may be that we have already invested more in undelivered BFL hardware than we currently have invested in the equipment currently running the network.

we have at least 1640 orders so far. Out of those we know that 82 of them are for a total of 14.76 Th. That's 180 Gh/order. Assuming this is a representative sample (which of course it might not be), we have 1640x180=295 Th ordered so far. At $30,000/Th, this is $8.85 million. Now, this is most likely an overestimate. The sample we have may not be representative, and some of the 1640 orders surely have been cancelled. But even if this estimate is off by a factor of 2, this is still $4.4 million. Of course, these estimates include the $ value of trade-ins, which is $ that are already in the network. But my statement was just about the $ invested in the current network vs $ invested in undelivered ASICs (including trade-ins). So I don't think my statement is all that unlikely, though as I said, it's not something I put forward as being really certain.

In today's difficulty, those first deploy the ASIC SC single will get about 20 BTC per day, but after a while it will drop quickly, back to 2 BTC per day maybe. Actually BFL is really good at making the pricing for their equipment, targeting a ROI time frame of about 6-12 months

The inherent character of BTC is racing, if you are not the first one with good hashing power in the first several hours, then your return will drop quickly

Another problem is that BTC system still rewards the richer, if you can get a 10 million $ loan, you can compromise the whole system with ASIC farms, sadly that means decentralization is always in danger, technically/financially there will always be a winner, but that maybe is the truth on this planet, winner take it all, losers can work much harder than winner, but they won't change the landscape